EspressoPundit

     Ruminations of an over-caffeinated political junkie

WAITING FOR THE GREAT PUMPKIN.  The blogsphere was in an over-caffeinated twitter over yesterday's John Kerry great pumpkin shot.

As I express in more detail in the CHEAP SHOT entry below.  I don't think these pictures matter.  What matters is the insight the pictures--and the reaction to them--provide about the campaign and the candidate. 

Unfortunately, when the Kerry campaign makes an otherwise harmless mistake they chose to lie like a little league batter in front of a broken window.

DRUDGE CONTINUES:  Kerry advisers defend the sudden deep tan transition, noting how it simply was from a game of flag football last Friday in Bedford, Mass.

But the College Democrats who met Kerry were surprised by his rich tan glow -- before the game even began, the HARVARD CRIMSON reports.

This reminds me of the exchange between Teresa Kerry and Colin McNickle at the Democratic National Convention

Teresa Kerry's speech included the line "We need to turn back some of the creeping, un-Pennsylvanian and sometimes un-American traits that are coming into some of our politics,"

Colin McNickle, the editorial page editor of the conservative Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, questioned her on what she meant by the term "un-American,"

The encounter was famous because she eventually told him to "shove it."  That doesn't bother me.  Who hasn't wanted to tell a reporter to shove it?  The part that bothers me is that she insisted that she  didn't say that"  Really Theresa?  You were talking to a bunch of people and the cameras were rolling.  How can she claim she never said it?

Camp Kerry's prevarication tendencies show up in the famous bunny suit story as well.  When the rocket scientists who handle Kerry realized that the suit didn't evoke the macho JFK image they thought it would, they immediately accused the real rocket scientists at NASA of dirty tricks

But the National Aeronautics and Space Administration told Fox News that the Kerry team saw the photos before publication and passed on their release.

One final example involves perhaps the most famous Kerry gaffe.

“‘I actually did vote for his $87 billion, before I voted against it,’ he told a group of veterans at a noontime appearance at Marshall University. He went on to explain that he preliminarily backed the request, so long as it was financed not by deficit spending but with a tax surcharge on the wealthy that Bush opposed.”

Kerry's post gaffe response:  "No, it wasn’t classic at all. It just was a very inarticulate way of saying something, and I had one of those inarticulate moments late in the evening when I was dead tired in the primaries and I didn't say something very clearly."

Lyndon Johnson eventually learned that if you lie about the little things, no one will trust you on the big things.  Maybe John Kerry should have learned that lesson while he was throwing his, err some one else's, medals, err ribbons over the White House fence. 

l